Biography sheds new light on Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs had a disdain for people who put profits first. In an upcoming authorised biography of the late Apple CEO, he calls the crop of executives brought in to run Apple after his ouster in 1985 “corrupt people" with “corrupt values" who cared only about making money.

Jobs was often bullied in school and stopped going to church at age 13, according to Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, which will be published Monday by Simon & Schuster. Advance sales of the biography have topped best-seller lists since Jobs died on October 5 after a long battle with cancer at age 56.

According to the book, he never went back to church after he saw a photo of starving children on the cover of Life Magazine. Later, he spent years studying Zen Buddhism.

As a teenager, he exhibited some odd behaviours – he began to try various diets, eating just fruits and vegetables for a time, and perfected staring at others without blinking.

Later, on the naming of Apple, Jobs told Isaacson he was “on one of my fruitarian diets".

He’d just come back from an apple farm, and he thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating".

Jobs reveals in the book that he didn’t want to go to college, and the only school he applied to was costly private college Reed in Portland, Oregon. Once accepted, his parents tried to talk him out of attending Reed, but he told them he wouldn’t go to college at all if they didn’t let him go there. Though he ended up attending, Jobs dropped out of the school after less than a year and never went back.

His pre-Apple job as a technician at Atari paid $US5 per hour. He saw a classified ad in the San Jose Mercury News, went to visit the company and informed them he wouldn’t leave unless they hired him.

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Jobs’ eye for simple, clean design was evident from early on. The case of the Apple II computer had originally included a Plexiglas cover, metal straps and a roll-top door. Jobs, though, wanted something elegant that would make Apple stand out. He told Isaacson he was struck by Cuisinart food processors while browsing at a department store and decided he wanted a case made of molded plastic.

He called Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, his “spiritual partner" at Apple. He told Isaacson Ive had “more operation power" at Apple than anyone besides Jobs himself – that there’s no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do. That, says Jobs, is “the way I set it up".

Jobs was never a typical CEO. Apple’s first president, Mike Scott, was hired mainly to manage Jobs, then 22. One of his first projects: getting Jobs to bathe more often. It didn’t really work.

Jobs’ dabbling in LSD and other aspects of 1960s counterculture has been well documented. In the book, Jobs says LSD “reinforced my sense of what was important – creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could."

In the early 1990s, after Jobs was ousted from Apple, he watched the company’s gradual decline from afar. He was angered by the new crop of people brought in the run Apple, and he called them “corrupt".

He told Issacson they cared only about making money “for themselves mainly, and also for Apple – rather than making great products."

He also revealed that the Beatles is one of his favourite bands, and one of his wishes was to get the band on iTunes before he died. He got them available for sale on iTunes in late 2010. Until then, the biggest-selling, most influential group in rock history has been glaringly absent from iTunes and other legal online music services.

The book was originally called iSteve and scheduled to come out in March 2012. The release date was moved up to November, then, after Jobs’ death, to this coming Monday. Isaacson interviewed Jobs more than 40 times, including just a few weeks before his death.

The book says Jobs put no subject off limits and had no control over its contents.